Answers

You're right about generic and high volume keywords having a ton of competition, especially if there's commercial intent for that keyword.

First - to find the best keywords I'd recommend using SEMrush or Ahrefs to find high volume keywords that have a lower difficulty score. The difficulty score is different from the AdWords competition score, and pertains to organic results instead of paid.

Like you mentioned, you should definitely target terms that people already are searching for related to your new terms you're introducing, and then introduce them to your new terms.

Like all marketing, repetition plays a big part. A benefit to you being the only one talking about it now is that you can shape the conversation. If you have email lists and social media accounts, you can actually influence the volume of searches for these new terms if your audience is large or passionate enough.

From what you wrote, you already know the strategy, you just need a good keyword tool to discover the hidden gems.

The golden summary: "Subdirectories are better for SEO. But don't let getting technical details right stop you from investing in blogging or content creation, because a blog on a subdomain is still better than no blog at all."

The reason being that there's so much noise out there, and so many who say they can do it, ranging from cheap outsourced people on Upwork to big New York City ad agencies who claim it's something they'll through into your contract with them.

So when you hire someone, even if they're doing quality work, it can be 4 months before you know for sure, and you've already spent that money.

If you are on a really tight budget, you have to either learn the basics yourself so that you can filter out the cruft, or rely on a trusted friend who used someone and can prove the improvements through Google Analytics reports.

To learn SEO, you should read sites like Moz.com and Backlinko.com, but you also need to get in the weeds and do it yourself - at least for a few months.

As far as a reasonable price, it all comes down to ROI. It's truly a difficult question to answer. I've thought about this a lot, and I think the best way to do it is to measure the value you'll get by ranking just your most important page for just your most important keywords. Focus on that small, narrow page first before expanding to your whole site. The concept here is that you may find that, hey if we get to the #3 ranking for these 10 keywords for this page, that will bring in 2,000 visits a month, which at a 3% conversion rate is worth $24,000 a month for our business. (Plug in your own numbers)

On average, a USA based SEO agency won't offer services for less than $1,500 a month. I would say the average reputable agency or consultant would charge $2,500 - 15,000/month for their services. But this can go all the way up to $100k+/month if you were a globo corp.

For a startup, you may want to look a solid smaller agencies or consultants or look outside the USA. The problem with finding cheaper labor on Upwork, especially for SEO, is that the results can be negative or very marginal. So does it matter that it's only $800/mo if it produces almost nothing, when a $2,500/mo service produces 50x more?

You won't know how to evaluate unless you learn the basics and run the numbers.

The best thing you as a business owner can do is be very clear up front what your best products or services are, what you need to get to break even, and what your ideal timeline is. If you're not clear on your average order value, customer lifetime value, or profit margins, you can't expect the SEO to figure that you, and if nobody knows these things, then all the efforts are not tied to business metrics, which makes things complex and without a solid strategy.

I'll take a different approach than the other answers: yes, it's likely you'll have issues switching to Shopify if you don't plan absolutely everything.

Now, if your site is making no money or a limited amount of money, the stakes aren't that high. But if you're making a substantial amount of money for your business from your ecommerce platform, then the stakes are absolutely high.

Here are the questions to ask:
-Do you have complicated, custom products that require configuration? If so, then really evaluate if the switch makes sense and can be done within scope.
-Do you have tons of product, over 1,000? If so, then take a good look at whether Shopify is the best.
-Are you using features on your legacy platform that are crucial and not built into Shopify?
-Are there certain traits on your site such as internal links or category page content that is difficult or different to implement on Shopify?
-The list goes on

Don't just flip the switch and hope it works. Shopify can be great for SEO, and better than your current platform. Or it can be way worse, depending on where you're coming from.

It is likely that you'll forget a few steps if you haven't done it before and if you don't have a solid website redesign SEO checklist.

If you miss out on a few critical things after you launch the redesign, these will harm the rankings:
-Forgetting to update robots.txt if you disallow search engines
-Forgetting to remove the noindex for pages you DO want in the index
-Not redirecting your important pages if you change URLs
-Letting important pages accidentally 404
-Not looking at all the elements helping important pages rank before making drastic changes

There's probably 50-100 items to check off if you're managing an important redesign for an important site.

If your site doesn't bring in much search traffic and you've got nothing to lose, then the risk is much smaller.

If your site is critical to your business, and you're making tons of changes, then there are some big risks there, so do some research or hire an expert to get it right!

Feel free to ping me or request a call if you have any follow-up questions, as I've done about 20 of these and so I have a huge checklist of my own to manage this process.

1. Google will continue to shift their algorithm to be more specific to the industry.

What this means is what works for a local printing company isn't going to work for Buzzfeed. What works for an ecommerce site is going to be different from a news site.

Search results have exploded in diversity of types of results over the last 5 years, and we're a long way past just 10 blue links.

This isn't new - Google's algorithm has been heading this way for awhile, but I don't think it's appreciated enough, and it will only get more accurate this year.

2. Featured Snippets are still up for grabs, but will get more accurate.

Featured Snippets inform voice search, and are actually really powerful if you earn it. Right now there's some logic to them - make sure you answer succinctly, use tables and bullet points, markup your content, etc - but Google is still experimenting widely on them.

This is an opportunity now to take advantage of, but keep an eye on how these things are changing.

3. Image and video recognition will improve and impact the algorithm more.

But the result from the test is that image-to-text extraction technology is not being used for ranking search queries.

I think that will change this year. Google's machine learning is just too good to not use it. Right now image search is a joke and very simple. They're going to understand image and videos even more this year.

Humans want rich content, and Google recognizes that.

Already Google can extract answers from YouTube videos and display the exact time sequence where that question is answered. That's kind of creepy. I think they're able to recognize this based on their voice algorithms, not so much video, as that's tougher to crack. But images will be next, and they'll play a bigger part in informing the content of the page and therefore contribute to ranking.

4. Sites will realize the power of their homepage and optimize it for search in some cases.

This is a random trend, but I've noticed a few sites doing this recently.

Naturally, a website gets most of their links to their home page, but most sites just generically target their home page, or make it just a portal to the rest of the site. This makes sense if you're Nike or Apple, but smaller companies need to be more tactical.

I'll be honest, many of the answers to this question here are far too simplistic and could be dangerous (for your site) because of the lack of information.

I've done about a dozen of these and each time it's complicated and something is missing. Here are the questions I've learned to ask.

Yes, 301 redirects are important between the old pages and the new, but digging deeper in that question you have to ask:

-Is just the domain changing, or are all of the URLs changing as well? For example are you going from oldsite.com/product-1 to newsite.com/product-1 OR are you going from oldsite.com/product-1 to newsite.com/products/shoes/product-name-32454?
-Is your whole website URL architecture changing? With whole categories of pages being added or removed?
-Are you moving your blog from a subdomain to your root domain or vice versa?
-Do you have ten pages on the old and new site, or tens of thousands? That will impact your method of redirects and how it affects site performance

Beyond 301 redirects, other things to consider:
-Can you isolate changes on your site into different stages? For example, just change the domain name and nothing else in this stage. In other stages you can change the design and content. Often times people want to go whizbang all at once and do everything.
-Are you switching platforms, such as a new CMS or Ecommerce platform? That changes a lot
-Are you dealing with parameters and filtering? Magento and other platforms create thousands and thousands of these URLs that you have to make a decision on
-Do you have a competent developer that will lead you, or do you need to triple check everything when it comes to SEO?
-Are you making sure all tracking codes make the leap between sites?
-Have you checked if the new platform has the same ability to edit important elements such as the title tag, meta description, URL, meta robots, rel=canonical, etc?
-Are you making sure that each page has it's own URL and you're not moving to a tab-based page view that will affect your page count? (Still matters)

This is just a sampling of some big important questions, and it's different for every project! Make sure to plan it better than you thought you'd need to, at least 30 days in advance.

I've run into the same problem in the past and been shocked about the amount of keywords I had never considered that drive traffic.

Primary keywords are often head tern keywords, which show up most often in the Google Keyword Planner. Google leans towards showing high volume, commercial intent keywords. They do show a lot of informational keywords, and keywords with 10 searches a month, yes, but they are predisposed towards keywords that AdWords bidders would want to bid on. So keep in mind when using that tool who Google's customers are.

I believe it is most likely worth the effort because if you're seeing not a ton of volume for your keywords, it's possible that your competitors saw the same and might have decided it wasn't worth focusing on SEO for as well. That could be your opportunity. It depends on your monetization strategy and your industry. If there were only 10 searches a month for "how to make an easter basket" and that's your industry, it would be tough to make a strong case for spending a lot of time and money on that. If there are 10 searches a month for "oil field exploration companies" then each one of those people represents millions of dollars of revenue.

So in order for you to decide if it's worth it, you have to know what industry you're in and the volume of your keywords and keyword value.

Here's an experiment you should do to see if it's worth it. Take your top 10 primary keywords, and write one page of content on each, at least 1,200 words of content either in the form of a blog post or a service page. Put your best effort into it, and imagine your target market is already visiting that page. Wait 30 days and check on those pages in Google's Search Console. More than likely you'll see those pages bringing in traffic for keywords you had no idea people were using to find your site. Or on the flip side, maybe there's just no demand there. Either way, this will give you an early indication of whether it's worth it or not without you having to make a big expensive decision.

If it's showing those duplicates AND your website does in fact show up for both URLs without redirecting, then yes that's something I've come across before and that's something for you to fix.

Each page on your site should show up for the www or non-www but not both. Choose whichever one has the most Domain Authority (Moz metric) and redirect the other version to that. Your developer should know how to do so. WWW is often recommended the most.

Paste "site:example.com" (replace example with your name) into Google search to see what version of your URLs is indexing the most.

It's a weird technical thing, but it's worth making sure you have it done right. It's most likely not going to be a game changer, but it will help your site to a small percentage to have that properly in place.

I haven't done this well, I'm just repeating what others have said, but are you trying to meet these surgeons in person in any way? Like you promote with your site, if you make just one connection with one bariatric surgeon that works with you, that's totally worth it.

Patrick McKenzie and Brennan Dunn advocate in person presentations at local chambers of commerces for example, so maybe there's some type of marketing or business summit for these surgeons that you can speak at or attend.

Another idea. You and I both know that people search Google for everything. So why not rank your own agency or consultancy for those you're going after. It's possible there are surgeons out there searching "how to get bariatric surgery patients" or something similar. Maybe only 5 searches a month, but you know the value of each of those searches.

Many in the agency/consulting world advocate high-touch sales and networking as the best way to get clients over ads or organic search, since it's a closer relationship required with lower volume.

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I just got off the phone with Joe. I was in the SEO world for a few years but it has been a while and it was refreshing to know what was still relevant for my current large publication. I have a religious niche blog that I feed to a Facebook following of over 525,000 followers, but Joe helped me see a few areas I could improve our organic traffic to add to our social media traffic. He had some great insights and was very warm and helpful. I would recommend him to anyone looking for SEO advice.

Joe was well-prepared, warm, and clearly an expert in his field. He researched the brand we were discussing beforehand and had practical tips that will assist me in building SEO and an audience immediately.

He recommended tools I could use and best practices that will save time and increase the efficiency of the project. He also discussed additional strategies on newsletters and content creation and had some hidden tricks of the trade to share.